German translation in window menues creates duplicate accelerator key

[Florian Heinle]

Starting with Ubuntu 16.04, window menues (minimize, maximize, close, etc) have new translations in German. Instead of the quite literal translations “maximieren” and “minimieren”, those menues now read “ver_kleinern”, “ver_größern”, […], “_Größe ändern”. This creates two problems:

1) “verkleinern” and “vergrößern” refer to relative changes in size, i.e. “decrease” and “increase”, whereas the menue items have an absolute effect on the window size, i.e. “minimize” and “maximize”, which is not clear from reading the menue. Also, “Größe ändern” means “change size” and may create confusion as to how this exact menue item will resize the window, in contrast to the other two.

2) Chosing g as the accelerator key for “vergrößern” creates a duplicate with “Größe ändern” and breaks the workflow of e.g. hitting alt+space, x for maximize and will require hitting G once or twice and enter once as a shortcut, whereas the previous translation required less keystrokes. This may sound nitpicky and it is, but we're talking about accelerator keys here. Their purpose is somewhat lost if their usage becomes too slow and they can't be used reliably with muscle memory.

Humble solution to those problems: Restore translations to “minimieren” and “maximieren” from before, which may not be as elegant a translation but will make menue actions clear and faster again.

[Michael Stucki (mstucki)]

This is a duplicate of #1575918 so it can be closed.